Hello,
Many Fedora-approved software licences require binary distributions to include the license text along with the software. For example the family of BSD licenses says that "redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution" and ASL 2.0 says that "You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License". My understanding is that in case of Fedora redistributing a copy of the license along with RPM package is a prerequisite for redistributing it al all.
In some cases the upstream itself doesn't redistribute the copy of the license. From technical point of view it's fine because they are copyright holders and therefore they can do whatever they want with the software they have rights to. In some other cases the upstream is providing source code only and source distribution doesn't require including the text of the license.
Fedora Licensing Guidelines says: "if (and only if) the source package includes the text of the license(s) in its own file, then that file, containing the text of the license(s) for the package must be included in %doc". This can cause problems in some cases.
My questions are:
1. According to Fedora Licensing Guidelines, is it prohibited to include the text of the license within the binary RPM package if the source package does not include the text of the license?
2. Isn't redistributing binary RPMs without the license text included (in case the license requires that) considered as violation of the license?
3. What is the proper way of handling the case when upstream is rejecting requests to include the license text in their distribution, while they are requiring Fedora to include it?
(An example of an affected package is annox, which is currently in its review process: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=808768)
Thank you, Mikolaj Izdebski Red Hat
On 05/11/2012 03:33 AM, Mikolaj Izdebski wrote:
My questions are:
- According to Fedora Licensing Guidelines, is it prohibited to include the text of the license within the binary RPM package if the source package does not include the text of the license?
Not prohibited, just not required. There is a minimal possibility that a maintainer may add a license text that is not accurate (or no longer accurate, in the case of an upstream license change, for example) to a package and thus incur some liability, so we do not require that they add missing license texts. Instead, we advise maintainers to ask the upstream to include proper license text.
- Isn't redistributing binary RPMs without the license text included (in case the license requires that) considered as violation of the license?
In the example you've provided (BSD), 99% of the time the answer is no. It says: "redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution"
Other materials provided with the distribution are the SRPMs, which usually include the source, which usually includes the license. If we were distributing binary-only, it would be a potential issue.
However, in the case you've pointed out (annox), they're not distributing the license in the source tree at all, just a pointer to the license on their website.
In the case of annox, I would recommend that the maintainer ask the upstream to clarify if they consider distribution of their software in binary and source form without any copy of the license text as a violation of their license. If the answer is "no", then we're okay, as that effectively acts as a waiver of that condition (and we should include a copy of that email in the package to document this waiver). If the answer is "yes", then, we should politely ask them again to add the license text to the source tree. If they won't do that, I would say the remaining options would be:
* The maintainer can make a copy of the license text from the website and include it with the Fedora package, if they choose to do so.
or
* We do not permit this package into Fedora.
It is extremely rare that upstream chooses a license that requires license text inclusion and does not provide license text in the source tree.
~tom
== Fedora Project
-
Mikolaj Izdebski -
Tom Callaway